A tale of many tongues

The publication of this year's GCSE results has been accompanied by much soul-searching about the "spiral of decline" in modern languages. But looking back over the decade the falls have just been in French and German. Other modern languages have increased by over 300%, and Spanish is up by 46%.

There are some who are so concerned about the falls in French and German that they would make them compulsory, but perhaps what we are witnessing is a change in the relative importance of the languages. French and German were important because they are our nearest neighbours, but in the global economy they seem much less so. And I know the French won't thank me for saying so but English is fast becoming the language of the European Union.

The four most often spoken languages in the world are, in order, Mandarin, English, Hindustani and Spanish. Spanish is fast rising in importance and there are now some pockets of the United States in which more people speak Spanish than English.

On this view it also becomes more important to learn Mandarin since relatively few Chinese are English speakers, and some schools such as Wellington are pioneering this. The burgeoning of "other modern languages" at GCSE could also reflect the importance of those languages in the world, but it also seems to have been fuelled by schools entering native speakers in examinations in their mother tongues as a contribution to the school's overall performance. The second best results of all (classics is top) are obtained in subjects in this category, with 54% achieving A*/A.

But if we are to think globally we must learn from our failures in French and German. The English appear to be notoriously bad at languages, something that was mercilessly parodied in the classic comedy 'Allo, 'Allo! It could be that we are arrogant and lazy and from our empire days we expect everyone to speak our language. A more likely explanation is the way we have confined language teaching to secondary education. In any language provision we wish to make, finding the teachers is a real problem. It might be thought that we could encourage native speakers to come here, but many of those that have come have taken fright at the unruly classroom behaviour.

The turnover of language teachers is higher than for any other subject because they can be given a hard time. Faced with not enough good teachers to go round, schools have been increasingly limiting the opportunity to take French and German at GCSE to those with some aptitude, so pass rates have been rising as entries have been falling.

There is in a sense a spiral of decline in French and German, with not enough teachers resulting in too few students to create a pool from which sufficient teachers can be drawn. But rather than trying to break into it by compulsion we need to rethink the role of modern languages in the curriculum. Whatever happens to French and German, we cannot impoverish our curriculum by not providing the opportunity for children to immerse themselves in the language and culture of at least one other country.

· Professor Alan Smithers is director of the centre for education and employment research at the University of Buckingham.